● 07.10.12

● Links 10/7/2012: Thunderbird Put to Rest, Catchup with Free/Open Source News

Posted in News Roundup at 9:03 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• CERN has “played a major role in bringing together scientific technologies and know-how regarding Linux in their Scientific Linux project, which acts as a clone and extension of Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” noted Slashdot blogger Chris Travers. “This goes *way* beyond the normal high performance computing usage of Linux. CERN is in the forefront of bringing Linux to the scientific community.”

• FixMeStick is a USB flash drive with a rudimentary version of Linux and a set of malware-removal tools. Insert it into a Windows-based PC infected with viruses or spyware and you’re able to boot from the basic OS on the drive. It will then scan your PC and attempt to remove the malicious code so your PC is functional again.

• I read an article on ZDNET. You can read it for yourself here. The Author was raising the point about companies who release Linux based services but fail to even mention Linux or their services’ heritage and what provides the actual base for their service. The Author points the finger specifically at Google’s Android and Canonical’s Ubuntu. I just want to extend on the Authors’ thoughts a little more.

Desktop

• Google has announced the launch of new Chromebook laptops and a new Chromebox desktop running version 19 of Chrome OS, a major software update to the minimalist Linux-based operating system built around the Chrome web browser. Chrome OS, the proprietary version of the open source Chromium OS, is designed primarily for accessing the web and cloud applications such as the company’s Google Apps web-based productivity suite. According to Google, the new devices and version of the OS represent “the next step”.

• In fact, the company is so proud of their product they sell it at a premium price. That is justifiable because of the huge touch-screen, the freedom from worry about software updated and viruses and the great ease of use. It’s still a small computer, though, an all-in-one. No big box at all, and with fewer cables.

Server

• Isnt’t that a laugh? M$’s charges more money in relation to how much of your own IT you can use? Do we have parking meters in our garages? Do we have coin-slots on our refrigerators? Do we pay to use our tools? Those are silly concepts. So is that other OS in IT.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Dan Risacher, a self-styled “policy wonk” in the directorate for enterprise services and integration under the office of the Department of Defense Chief Information Officer and open source advocate, spoke May 24 before Mil-OSS LANT, a military open source adoption conference.

Kernel Space

• With the help of uprobes, performance monitoring tools can now monitor userspace software. The ongoing overhaul of the ARM code is showing tangible success.

• Several Phoronix readers have written in that Eugeni Dodonov, a former Mandriva developer who since last year has been working for the Intel Open-Source Technology Center on their Linux graphics driver, lost his life this weekend.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The Amarok Development Team is looking for beta testers ahead of the release of version 2.6 of the open source Amarok music player.

• Starting with version 2.6, digiKam features the Tools → Maintenance menu which gives you access to tools designed to perform a variety of housekeeping tasks: from scanning for new photos to running a face recognition action. Here is a brief overview of the available tools.

GNOME Desktop

• Elena Petrevska is a fresh member of GWOP* and GnomeWeb Team from Macedonia. Recently Gnome decided to give a new look to all pages and Elena is a part of the team responsible for these changes.

Distributions

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• I have heard a lot of good things of PCLinuxOS and yesterday, finally I decided to try it out. I downloaded the stable version 2012.2 (KDE) from the PCLinux FTP. The ISO is about 690 MB and I booted it up in my VirtualBox. The initial liveCD boot was easy, it asked a couple of questions on my keyboard and location and finally landed on the desktop.

• As Mandriva SA plans its future roadmap, the company will be taking a unique and bold step with its commercial offerings: using and participating in two separate upstreams for its product lines.

• According to CEO Jean-Manual Croset and Director of Community Charles Schulz, the Mandriva server products will be based on the Mageia distribution of Linux, while desktop and OEM products will be based on the historical Mandriva Linux distro.

• The heads of Mandriva SA have decided to base upcoming server versions of Mandriva on Mageia, the community run Mandriva fork

Gentoo Family

• Every year members of the Gentoo project hold their annual Gentoo screenshot contest, and it’s that time of year again right now. And just as the name implies, it is indeed a contest for the prettiest, coolest, or whatever-vague-criteria-is-used-but-isn’t-published-anywhere Gentoo desktop setup. All you need is a Gentoo install and an Internet connection to win.

Red Hat Family

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• ARM employee Catalin Marinas has released a set of 36 patches that will extend the Linux kernel to provide support for ARM’s AArch64 64-bit architecture. This 64-bit ARM support will be provided by the ARMv8 instruction set, which was announced in the autumn of 2011 and is expected to be first used in processors in 2014.

• I feel a certain kinship with newer Linux converts. Switching to Linux on the desktop is definitely a unique experience that many of us tend to forget. For instance, the need to stop and think about where a tool’s located can be challenging for newbies.

Devices/Embedded

• THE INQUIRER sat down with Eben Upton, executive director of the Raspberry Pi Foundation this week to hear about why he became involved with the project and how the development of a cased model of the small, inexpensive computer for schools is coming along.

Phones

• STOCKHOLM—Finnish start-up Jolla Ltd. is in talks with various hardware makers and hopes to unveil within the next six months a smartphone that runs Nokia Corp.’s largely-abandoned MeeGo operating system, the company’s chief executive said Monday.

• Nokia’s MoeeGo team has left the company and created a start-up called Jolla Ltd to build on top of MeeGo. Nokia has been severely criticized for ditching all of its open source projects and turned the company into a Microsoft’s Pizza delivery boy. Instead of going with Android or company’s own MeeGo, ex-Microsoft execute Stephen Elop adopted Microsoft’s failed Windows platform. MeeGo based N9 was a massive success, but Elop declared that even if N9 succeeds they will not divert from their Microsoft plan. N9′s success proved that MeeGo holds great potential.

• When it lost support from both Intel and Nokia, the MeeGo mobile platform appeared to be dead in the water. But it seems the OS still has a few faithful friends. JollaMobile, a company made up of former Nokia employees, aims to create a smartphone that will propel MeeGo back into the market. Whether it will find a warm welcome there remains to be seen.

Android

• HP will reportedly hand over a portion of the team behind its Enyo HTML5-based webOS framework to Google.

• As reported by The Verge, several Enyo team members – including leader Matt McNulty and many of those behind the software’s code – will leave the troubled HP and join the search giant.

• Sony Mobile has just rolled out the open source code for the Xperia S Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich firmware version number 6.1.A.0.452. This particular version will carry all the relevant files required if you are a budding third-party developer who intends to construct a kernel that hopefully, will be worthy of making its way to the public as your very own ROM for the Xperia S.

Free Software/Open Source

• Your procurement rules have gradually built up as you’ve played the procurement game with your suppliers. At its rawest, the vendors’ game is a chase to obtain as large a share of your IT budget as possible, preferably locked-in so that it becomes recurring revenue, while exposing themselves to the least cost and risk possible. Your suppliers’ tools of choice are proprietary software, proprietary data formats, and as much complexity as can be slathered into the solution.

• The announcement by NYSE Technologies, the commercial technology division of NYSE Euronext, that it is expanding the terms of its partnership with the Warsaw Stock Exchange, illustrates how the exchange company expects to significantly increase revenue by commercializing its own technology.

• The open source Puppet configuration management system is widely used to get software onto servers. Now the developers behind Puppet are going a step further, taking aim at bare metal provisioning in an open source effort with EMC called Razor.

• The term ‘open source’ comes from computer programming. It refers to a computer program that isn’t owned by any company and is freely available to the general public. Microsoft Word, by contrast, is ‘closed source’ — the Microsoft Corporation owns the code for its software and will never make it available or give it away for free.

• A little-known program called Open Office is a freely available alternative to Microsoft Office with many of the same features. A loose group of programmers around the world created Open Office and constantly tinkers with it to make it better. They do this for free with no benefit besides the pleasure of providing a useful service for anonymous users.

• There has been a long standing belief (or perhaps more accurately, fear), that developers who chose to release the source code for their software under a free and open license can’t turn their project into a viable source of income.

• It’s not hard to see how this negative connotation has developed. Those who may not be well versed in the various free and open licenses may believe that they are literally prohibited from charging for their software. Others may fall victim to the failed logic that, if the source is freely available, people won’t pay for the convenience of a binary build.

• On August 1st, Berlin-based filmmaker Sam Muirhead is abandoning all copyrighted products and switching to Open Source software, hardware, and services for one year, as the subject of his own series of online documentary videos.

• Network security companies looking for an open-source-based intrusion detection and prevention engine have a next-generation tool that can be incorporated into their existing or new offerings: Check out the latest beta of the Open Information Security Foundation’s (OISF) Suricata Engine.

• Collide, which lets multiple programmers tap into a software development project, is open-source software now that Google has cast it off. One project member hopes it’ll inspire related projects.

• Electronic business has many levels. No surprise then that e-business (or e-commerce if you prefer) is served by e-accounting, which itself comprises of e-payments and (before that) e-invoicing… and every other level of e-accounting if you have the stomach for an endless stream of new-age e- prefixes.

• The discovery of the Higgs boson is of course a monumental achievement. But also noteworthy is how the physics community has evolved to get things done – and what this trajectory suggests for other scientific fields and fast-changing industries.

• Google has been developing a Web-based editor for computer code–what’s known as an integrated development environment, or IDE–for several years now. Mark S. Miller, an engineer for the company, revealed the existence of the project, known as Brightly, in a post to a mailing list in November 2010 about Google’s Dart programming language.

Events

Mozilla

• With the recent news that Mozilla will no longer be innovating with new versions of Thunderbird, many Ubuntu users might be left wondering what this will mean for their favorite distribution’s default suite of software. In fact, it seems like Canonical has had it’s hands full over the last two years trying to find a winning combination. Canonical has thrown it’s hands up in the air before and changed default software on a whim, most famously switching from enterprise friendly Evolution to user-friendly and mainstream Thunderbird. Also, it chose to abandon the stellar Banshee player in favor of the more homely and less feature-rich Rhythmbox.

• Mozilla’s current success is born out of a decision made over a decade ago to split up the Mozilla Browser Suite. The original Mozilla Browser (now continued in SeaMonkey) has both email and browser which was split out into separate projects: Thunderbird and Firefox.

SaaS

• NASA was one of the primary driving forces behind OpenStack, an effort to provide an open source alternative to Amazon’s popular cloud services. But as OpenStack takes off in other places, the space agency is turning away from the open source platform — and into the arms of Amazon.

• Open source software is driving innovation in cloud computing, mobile apps and big data, CloudPro reports.

Databases

• Increasingly the third standard within enterprises for databases, MongoDB, has been claiming a lot of victories lately. In relative terms, it has become the second-hottest skill to have on one’s resume, right after HTML5, according to Indeed.com job trend data. And despite plenty of hating on its technology, with one person telling me recently that “it sets database technology back 25 years,” MongoDB continues to get deployed for numerous, large mission-critical applications.

• Just a few short years ago, MySQL was the undisputed king of the open-source database hill. But with the NoSQL market emerging at an 82 per cent compound annual growth rate (CAGR), it’s looking like MySQL may get bulldozed by its NoSQL peers.

• While this shift toward NoSQL provides an interesting commentary on where the industry is heading, it’s even more instructive about the frenetic pace of innovation that open source is driving.

CMS

• Joomla!, one of the world’s most popular open-source content management system, has recently launched a website for Joomla! World Conference.

Education

• Meanwhile, the responsibility of the government is to provide “source code”, the basis for teaching that can be tweaked and changed.

• Earlier this year, Department for Education secretary Michael Gove said that the lessons would be altered to include “an open source curriculum” and “rigorous computer science courses.”

Business

• We all know that PEPPOL focuses on e-procurement, but it is no secret that pan-European adoption of e-invoicing is also high on the project’s agenda. The technological PEPPOL developments have taken another step towards this goal. And this all thanks to Norwegian SendRegning.

• Under development for the past 19 months, Zurmo is the brainchild of McKay, cofounder Ray Stoeckicht, and Jason Green, cofounder and lead architect, who are all part of the leadership team at Intelestream, an open source enterprise applications developer and professional services firm.

• Company hopes gamification principles in its CRM application, now in beta, will make it stand out and better engage users

• Sirius is launching an Open Source Open Day programme to educate Government, Public Sector and business organisations on how to get the most benefit from using Open Source software within their technology infrastructure.

• With the UK in double-dip recession, no let-up in the Government drive for austerity, and the old-fashioned idea of economic growth making a comeback, Western economies have much to learn from the BRICS in utilising Open Source to combine public austerity with private growth. Extensive usage of Open Source is a signature of those economies which are thriving despite the global downturn and contrast markedly with the malaise throughout European economies.

Funding

• 10gen, creator of the open source MongoDB database software, has raised $42 million in new capital in a venture round led by New Enterprise Associates, says Forbes.

Project Releases

• The developers of the open source web analytics engine Piwik have released versions 1.8 and 1.8.1 of their software. Version 1.8 brings several key improvements to the user interface and introduces Do Not Track (DNT) support. The 1.8 release is also rated as a critical update after a security review identified a “limited” XSS vulnerability, a cookie denial of service vulnerability and a local file inclusion vulnerability. The Piwik developers recommend updating to the latest version as soon as possible, with the latest version being 1.8.1, released a few days after 1.8 after a number of regressions were found.

• In the latest major update to their open source BitTorrent client, the developers at the Transmission Project have mainly focused on enhancements that affect Mac users. The 2.60 release of the peer-to-peer file sharing client adds support for the new Retina display (HiDPI) in Apple’s latest MacBook Pro laptop and is, the developers say, now ready for the Gatekeeper security feature in Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, which is expected to arrive later this month.

• The FFmpeg developers have announced the first major update to the open source audio and video codecs package since January. FFmpeg 0.11, code-named “Happiness”, includes several new encoders and decoders for additional video formats including Blu-ray and Apple’s ProRes. A significant number of bugs have also been fixed.

Public Services/Government

• As government agencies and departments expand their capabilities for collecting information, the volume and complexity of digital data stored for public purposes is far outstripping departments’ ability to make sense of it all. Even worse, with data siloed within individual departments and little cross-agency collaboration, untold hours and dollars are being spent on data collection and storage with return on investment in the form of information-based products and services for the public good.

• The October 2009 memo on Defense Department use of open source software may have inadvertently created an additional roadblock to it, said attendees of a conference on military use of open source.

• The October 2009 memo (.pdf), widely seen as a landmark for its assertion that open source software qualifies as a “commercial item” under federal and Defense acquisition policy definition of the term (and so removing a previous barrier to is wider use), also stipulated that program managers before using open source software must “ensure that the plan for software support…is adequate for mission need.”

• Talk within the Defense Department of creating a government open source foundation hopefully will become reality despite the climate of budget austerity that might prevent its formation.

• The European Commission wants to improve its free and open-source software repository system using an enhanced metadata specification meant to help E.U. countries exchange more information about their free and open-source software projects.

• The European Commission wants to improve its free and open-source software repository system using an enhanced metadata specification meant to help E.U. countries exchange more information about their free and open-source software projects.

Licensing

• The first NHS Hack Day has highlighted applications which could help the UK’s National Health Service provide better, more customisable services for people. The event was won by a group who developed an electronic patient task list for doctors.

Openness/Sharing

• Avination Virtual Limited announced today that it has released code for llCastRay to the open source OpenSimulator project, as promised at Linux Day in Berlin last month.

• If you’ve ever watched ski or snowboard films and thought “I could do that”, Teton Gravity Research (TGR) have now given you the perfect excuse to prove it. They’ve put up a $100,000 cash prize for the best segment submitted to TetonGravity.com during the 2012/13 season.

• The future of the UK economy depends on the switch to ‘open-source banking’, according to Alistair Milne, Professor of Financial Economics at Loughborough University.

• Speaking at today’s launch of the Loughborough University Centre for Post-Crisis Finance, which is part of the School of Business and Economics, Professor Milne advocated radical change in the structure and process of banking, defining ‘open-source banking’ as having open access to banking information and systems.

Open Data

• TomTom makes its money from navigation solutions, so it’s not a huge surprise that it’s not terribly fond of open source maps on a general level. It has been accused, however, of overstating the error potential in competing open source map sources as part of a blog post discrediting them.

• Satnav manufacturer TomTom has written an article strongly criticising cartographical open data projects like OpenStreetMap for their “accuracy and reliability”.

• “Open source mapping has really come into the limelight in the past few years, and many businesses have started to experiment with its use in industry,” says TomTom on its website. “The limelight, however, brings with it closer scrutiny, and recent reports on the accuracy and reliability of open source maps make for uncomfortable reading.”

Open Access/Content

• Science-publishing ventures continually battle for market space, yet most operate on one of only two basic business models. Either subscribers pay for access, or authors pay for each publication — often thousands of dollars — with access being free. But in what publishing experts say is a radical experiment, an open-access venture called PeerJ, which formally announced its launch on 12 June, is carving out a fresh niche. It is asking its authors for only a one-off fee to secure a lifetime membership that will allow them to publish free, peer-reviewed research papers.

Open Hardware

• 3D printing may still seem like a science fiction concept to the uninitiated, but to those who are willing to open their eyes, it is very apparent that it is here, it is now, and it is exploding in popularity. Don’t take my word for it.

• In the 20th century, getting your child a toy car meant a trip to a shopping mall. In the 21st century, it can mean going to your computer, downloading a file and creating the toy on your 3-D printer.

• Only that is not quite revolutionary enough for Massimo Banzi, who spoke at the TED Global conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, in late June. As Banzi pointed out, the 3-D printer a friend of his used to build a toy car was itself an open-source device — one that could be produced by anyone from freely available plans.

• Medical device design is heavily regulated for obvious safety reasons. But a number of researchers–including those with support from the Food and Drug Administration–are developing “open-source” healthcare equipment. The idea is to offer completely transparent, shared software code and mix-and-match interface and hardware designs. While this might seem risky, the goal is to spark faster and more effective innovation in the medical device field, while making it easier to spot potential programming bugs and other device failures.

• Medical technology: Applying the “open source” model to the design of medical devices promises to increase safety and spur innovation

Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

• Alas, I’m not surprised that the customers of the various services will view this as “business as usual.” We’ve all become accustomed to the idea that web sites go down, emails go astray, computers fail, and in general Internet services are mostly available.

• Many years ago, I worked for a short while on telephone switching systems. Those were the days of Ma Bell, and Ma was very demanding. As I recall, switching systems were required to have a Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) of ten years, and a Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) of thirty minutes. It wasn’t easy, but those specifications were met…and rare indeed was the occasion when you picked up a telephone and were met with total silence. (Telephone offices typically had 48 hours of backup power.)

Finance

• Wall Street employees, who dispense financial advice to individuals and companies, aren’t following a basic investing tenet with their own money: diversification.

• Workers at the five largest Wall Street banks saw the value of company stock in their 401(k) accounts, sometimes the biggest holding of those plans, decline more than $2 billion last year, according to annual filings. Those losses don’t include shares received as bonuses.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• This month, a former leader of the Internal Revenue Service filed a complaint that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has violated the terms of its nonprofit status by operating primarily for the private benefit of its corporate members, based on documents and research from the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), which manages PRWatch, ALECexposed, and SourceWatch. The complaint, which also alleges that ALEC misrepresented itself in tax filings, raises additional allegations beyond those in earlier IRS complaints filed by Common Cause.

Privacy

Civil Rights

DRM

• A few months ago, we outlined a few of the major moments in the history of digital rights management (DRM) in the music industry. This time, we’re talking about TV, video, and the events in the ongoing fight over copying. We’re still calling it the “DRM graveyard”–but as you’ll see, the failures that DRM has seen in the music world aren’t quite yet as plentiful when it comes to video.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Every year, I teach the AMOS class, a lab course on “Agile Methods and Open Source” that combines lectures with a real software project that ideally turns into a startup (see the AMOS Project concept, in German). To explain open source, I have to introduce students to intellectual property rights, of which most have been blissfully unaware of until then. Nothing teaches concepts better than a colorful story, and so I have been using the IP strategies around Java to make this dry topic come alive. For fun, comments, and corrections, I’m providing the short version of my talk below, including commentary. (You can also download a PDF version of the talk, licensed as CC-BY 3.0. If you find this useful for teaching, please tell me.) Students at this point have a basic working understanding of intellectual property and exclusion rights. Please let me know what you think! Finally, IANAL.

Copyrights

• In a move that scares the pants off of online software distribution such as Steam, the Court Of Justice of the European Union has just ruled that people should be able to resell downloaded games. While this does not effect the Land of the Free, where its French-backed Junta wants its people to pay many times for software they own. However, the ruling means that what it might say in the EULAs you are allowed to sell your old software. Steam, Origin, and GamersGate will now have their work cut out trying to work out a way to restore some rights to those who buy software online.

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